As many readers will know, I am the author of UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, which summarizes my extensive research on the topic. I recently stumbled upon a Reddit post relating to the September 1964 Big Sur UFO Incident, involving a US Air Force photographic team that inadvertently filmed a domed-disc UFO disrupting the test flight of a dummy nuclear warhead.
According to former USAF Lieutenant (now Dr.) Bob Jacobs, after the UFO approached and circled the warhead—officially known as a Re-entry Vehicle or RV—it directed four bright beams of light at it, whereupon the warhead began tumbling, eventually falling into |
By Robert Hastings
The UFO Chronicles
5-1-2025
|
the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles short of its target downrange.
At the time, Jacobs headed-up the photographic team tasked with filming dozens of missile test launches at Vandenberg AFB, California, using a high-powered telescope/camera system. Located a hundred or so miles northwest of the base, on a coastal mountaintop near the village of Big Sur, the remote site permitted the launches to be filmed from a side-view.
In his Reddit post, “dingleberryjuice” cited my in-depth research on the case—as summarized in my book’s chapter, “Shot from the Sky”—which fully supports the credibility of Dr. Jacobs’ revelations about the still-classified incident.
The former lieutenant says that he screened the film shortly after it was shot, in the office of Major (later Dr.) Florenze Mansmann, the chief photographic analyst at Vandenberg in 1964, and that two mysterious men in civilian suits—who turned out to be CIA officers—were also in attendance.
Jacobs was astonished by what his team had unknowingly captured on film. Mansmann then dismissed him, saying, “This never happened,” and sternly warning him to never discuss what he had witnessed.
Mansmann is on the record as saying that the CIA officers confiscated the film immediately afterward, designating it Top Secret. According to the retired major, the stunning footage was then “rushed East on a special aircraft”, almost certainly to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), located in Washington D.C.
At this point, I will mention that, beginning in February 2024, former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) director Luis Elizondo has repeatedly stated that he had watched the film in question while with AATIP. Importantly, he confirms that it shows exactly what Dr. Jacobs has claimed ever since he wrote about the warhead-shootdown in a magazine article in 1985.
In spite of this definitive revelation, which dingleberryjuice knew about, he also chose to cite in his Reddit post debunking claims made by the late Kingston George—a member of the photographic team at Vandenberg—who says that he too viewed the film in 1964, alleging that it didn’t show a UFO pacing the dummy warhead but, rather, decoy warheads accompanying the real RV. Those were meant to test whether such decoys could help protect US nuclear warheads from being shot down by Soviet anti-missile missiles, should a war ever erupt.
George claims that Jacobs inadvertently mistook the decoys for a UFO.
In his Reddit post, dingleberryjuice asked anyone having documentation relating to the case to post it on the chain, to try to resolve this key question: Did the Big Sur filming incident actually involve a bona fide UFO, or merely misidentified decoy warheads?
Instead of doing that, I have chosen to present my contributions to the debate here, so as to educate a much larger audience than the handful of individuals on Reddit who read and responded to dingleberryjuice’s comments.
While all of the Air Force and CIA records relating to the Big Sur Incident remain highly classified, I nevertheless possess several private letters, mostly from the mid-1980s, written by Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Mansmann in response to inquiries by various researchers. Although not official US government documentation relating to the incident, they importantly provide key, unguarded testimony about the case from the two ex-Air Force officers who, unlike Kingston George, were directly involved in it.
As we will see, that testimony convincingly discredits George’s claim about having been able to watch the film in question “weeks later”—that is, weeks after the screening in Mansmann’s office, which he did not attend—simply because it had already left Vandenberg AFB in the custody of the CIA officers. Consequently, George had to have watched a different film and, therefore, his theory about decoy warheads being mistaken for a UFO by Jacobs and Mansmann has no merit. (Reader, after clicking on the above link, scroll to the last page of George's article, where he says, “Weeks later, my clearance level was increased to allow me to see the films again and analyze them.”)
(Indeed, while George insists that the launch occurred on September 22, 1964, and uses the scheduled decoy-related test on that date to make his case, Jacobs says that the film he saw in Mansmann’s office was actually shot on September 15th, when no decoys were deployed during the flight. Significantly, former high-level government intelligence analyst David Grusch has recently revealed that radar data from that launch, discovered while he was working with the UAP Taskforce, confirms the tracking of a single unknown object—presumably the UFO—flying near the dummy warhead. Given this, he explicitly endorses Dr. Jacobs’ assertion that the September 15th date for the launch is the correct one.)
Jacobs’ and Mansmann’s Letters
Actually, before I present the former USAF officers’ responses to researchers in the 1980s, this first letter was written by Florenze Mansmann on November 15, 1995, and sent to a television producer, Curt Collier. In it, the retired major unequivocally confirms that Bob Jacobs’ public statements about the Big Sur UFO encounter are “all true as presented”.
The second letter was written by Mansmann to researcher Peter Bons on March 8, 1983, in which he states that the filmed craft that circled the dummy warhead, while directing four beams of light at it, was assumed by him to be “extraterrestrial”. Referring to details that he observed with a Loup magnifier, when examining the footage frame-by-frame, Mansmann describes the UFO as a “classic disc, the center seemed to be a raised bubble”. He further says, “At the point of beam release…the object turned like an object required to be in a position to fire from a platform”.
The third letter was written by Mansmann to researcher T. Scott Crain Jr. on May 6, 1987. In it, he elaborates on the circumstances surrounding the screening in his office and speculates that the amazing events captured on film were probably still being kept secret because of the US government’s so-called “Star Wars” research projects then underway, aimed at creating directed-energy beam weapons that could destroy Soviet nuclear warheads in flight.
The fourth letter was written by Dr. Bob Jacobs to Dr. Florenze Mansmann on January 14, 1985, in which he discusses the Big Sur Incident at length, offering his opinion about its meaning—it was “a shot across the bow … of our nuclear silliness ship”—and passionately arguing that the US government should not keep the incident secret forever.
The last letter that I’ll present here, written by Mansmann to researcher Lee Graham on March 10, 1983, confirms that “the original [35mm film] was rushed East on a special aircraft when we released it [to the CIA officers]”. Once again, this statement establishes beyond question that Kingston George could not possibly have viewed the same film at Vandenberg “weeks later” as he claimed, simply because it was long-gone from the base.
(BTW In the first letter, Mansmann states that the only copy of the film—the 16mm version that was screened on a projector in his office—was “confiscated by the two Government Agents and placed in a briefcase before they departed”. In other words, George also could not have viewed, weeks later, that copy of the film either.)
I also possess three more private letters on this topic, written to various individuals by Jacobs or Mansmann in the 1980s, that I will not include in this article. They are basically redundant in terms of what they reveal, relative to the ones that I have presented here.
In conclusion, while Kingston George attempted to discredit what he called “Bob Jacobs’ weird claims” about a UFO shooting down a dummy nuclear warhead in flight in September 1964, the extensive private correspondence of Jacobs and Florenze Mansmann convincingly confirms that the incident, however bizarre and difficult to believe, did in fact occur.
